3

Menander and New Comedy

Shakespeare’s relation to his classical predecessors has been studied and pondered from a multiplicity of angles, from the perspective of specific borrowings and analogues in the work of Baldwin, Bullough and others, to the structural and thematic relationships suggested by Barber and more recently Leo Salingar and Robert Weimann. Inquiry into the influence of New Comedy on Shakespeare has generally fallen into two major areas: Saturnalia or the festive element which Barber so cogently explored in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, and stock characterization and plot which Bernard Knox delineated in his classic essay on The Tempest and ancient comedy.¹ Though Salingar has contributed astute readings of often ignored classical plays, and Weimann has assembled often overlooked popular source materials, both remain essentially within the parameters defined by earlier scholars. Both give short shrift to Menander and the New Comic tradition he represents. Careful reading of the extant plays of Menander as well as his Roman imitators, however, suggests another field of comparison which serves to illuminate both the nature of Shakespeare’s debt to the earliest practitioners of comedy and his own originality.

Menander’s fame throughout antiquity was immense. The Greek critic Aristophanes of Byzantium characterized Menander’s reputation when he wondered which of the two, life or Menander, copied the other. Quintilian claimed that the careful study of Menander alone would be sufficient to train the perfect orator; Propertius, Ovid and Ausonius refer to him as the chief poet of love. Ancient writers quote him again and again, and the constant allusions to his name and reputation show that he was widely regarded as the finest comic playwright of Greece. The dearth of extant texts of Menander’s plays, and more importantly, the twentieth-century preoccupation with the origins of drama and the popular tradition represented by Aristophanes and Old Comedy, account for the decline in his reputation.

We are uncertain when the plays of Menander were lost. As late as the fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris laid Menander’s Epitrepontes and Terence’s similarly plotted Hecyra before his son in one of the earliest examples of the comparative method.² By the middle ages, however, Menander existed only in fragments and in scattered allusions which testify to his continued reputation. In the sixteenth century, Menander was available in a collection of fragments published in Paris in 1553 in two editions, both in Greek, one with facing Latin text. But for the Renaissance, the most eminent comic dramatist of antiquity was essentially a poet without a text. His influence on Renaissance comedy is not direct; it comes into the period by way of hellenistic romance which was influenced by Euripides and New Comedy; by way of Roman comedy and its vernacular imitations; and through rhetorical handbooks which recommended New Comic strategies of characterization.³

Comic stereotypes evolved out of dramatic and oratorical traditions and were eventually codified first in Aristotle’s discussion of types in the Rhetoric and the Ethics, and later by Theophrastus, the teacher of Menander, and by Cicero. Aristotle describes a series of men – old, young, wealthy, dissolute – and the attributes appropriate to each in generalized terms according to their habits, ages and fortunes; Theophrastus bases his Characters, published three years after the production of Menander’s first comedy, on observations of detail. For example, he describes three different misers, each with different traits and details of behavior. The types commonly associated with comedy, the braggart, the flatterer, the young lover, the old man, are thought to come into the Renaissance from Aristotle, Theophrastus, Cicero and Quintilian, as well as from the Roman dramatists.

Although critics have most often cited types as the major difference between Shakespearean and New Comic characterization, type characterization need not preclude change or character development.⁴ We all know that in most of Shakespeare’s comedies, the self-deceived undergo changes which are integral to the movement of the plot. Shakespeare is traditionally opposed in this respect to the ancients and to Jonson, that most classical of Renaissance playwrights, in whose plays ignorance and self-deception function to render the victim susceptible to intrigue perpetrated by other characters and to expose his folly, but are not designed to lead to a change in character. As Salingar puts it, ‘the most general working rule … in New Comedy is that there should be confusion over someone’s identity, not primarily his psychological identity, his inner self, but his birth, his original name and status’.⁵ But in Menander there is abundant evidence that type characters break the bonds of their stereotypes, grow and change. Menander consistently uses external mistakes and errors to occasion just that kind of psychological or internal change which Salingar and others attribute only to Shakespeare. Classicists have long recognized Menander’s interest in character and his serious intentions.⁶ The comedies of Menander reveal a long tradition of using the conventional device of mistaken identity to develop character and dramatize the theme of self-knowledge on the New Comic stage.

Recent discoveries of papyri in Egypt now afford us one complete play of Menander and substantial portions of five others. We know the Dyskolus to be an early play because it won first prize at the dramatic festival of Lenaea in 316 BC; the Perikeiromene and the Epitrepontes are assigned to his mature period. The three plays employ the same techniques for dramatizing psychological change and development and are representative of Menander’s preoccupation with character.

Menander’s Dyskolus or The Grouch deals almost exclusively with psychological or inner mistaken identity. There are no lost children, no birth tokens, no twins. As Pan reports in the prologue, Knemon, the grouch of the title, has false assumptions about himself and the world. He is the senex iratus par excellence; his grouchiness is the expression of his misanthropy. Though the play does involve the marriage of Knemon’s daughter to a young lover, its real business is to educate Knemon by exposing the limits of the cynic philosophy of self-sufficiency.⁷ When the play opens, he has rejected everyone – friends, neighbors, wife, stepson – believing them to be self-interested. He thinks that by doing so he can be wholly self-sufficient. The major action of the play involves his fall into a well, a parodic descent into the underworld, from which he is saved by the very person he has rejected most unfairly, his stepson. Here, as he will in later plays, Menander uses the motif of ‘losing to find’, for in the well where he almost loses his life, Knemon finds himself.

When he emerges, his stepson Gorgias tells Knemon that his experience is similar to his self-imposed isolation and misanthropy. His stepfather, Gorgias says, has been living in that same darkness, but in psychological rather than physical terms. The well is the physical embodiment of his psychological state, and physical suffering is the means of his psychological release. Gorgias’ generous action disproves Knemon’s view of the world; therefore, Knemon acknowledges him as his son. The old man’s self-questioning is objectified in his suffering in the well, and by his own admission, it leads him to greater self-knowledge. The soliloquy which follows was probably spoken from the ekkylema or rolling platform, a conventional device belonging to tragedy.⁸

I was, it seems, wrong in one regard: Thinking that I alone of all was truly self-sufficient and would never be in need of anyone. But now that I have seen that the end of life is sudden and unforeseen, I find I was mistaken. One needs a person who will help one, who will be at one’s side. But, by Hephaestus! my mind was corrupted when I saw how people lived, always calculating for their own advantage. I thought that nobody could be well disposed to anybody else. This is what stood in my way. Now, at last, one person, Gorgias, has provided the proof, by doing what only the noblest man would do. Though I would not allow him to come to my door, never helped him in the slightest, never addressed or spoke him a friendly word, he saved my life. And then he could have said, and rightly, ‘Since you do not let me come near, I do not come near; you have not been useful to us, neither am I to you now! ’What is it, my boy? Whether I die now (and I think I shall, I seem to be in a bad way) or live on, I make you my son. Therefore consider everything I chance to have your own.⁹

Knemon’s monologue presents a man questioning his past assumptions and changed by his recent experience. Though very different from Angelo’s soliloquy, it displays some of the features of dialogue used to represent the inner life. Knemon makes his speech before an audience consisting of Gorgias and others, yet not until the final lines does he speak directly to his stepson. Instead, he muses aloud about his past behavior and refers to Gorgias in the third person. The old man hypothesizes what ‘anyone else in his [Gorgias’] place would have said’. The invented interchange with a hypothetical interlocutor establishes the I/you dichotomy of dialogue; that ‘anyone else’ we understand to be Knemon himself who recounts what he would have felt and said had he found himself in Gorgias’ predicament. Menander’s emphasis on error dispelled by the stepson testifies to his interest in educating Knemon, for the misanthropist’s fall into the well leads to the re-establishment of familial and social relationships which he has heretofore denied. In the remainder of the play the servants whom he has earlier harassed harass him and finally drive him to take part in the festivities which mark the final reconciliation.

The Perikeiromene or She Who Was Shorn, usually dated late fourth century BC, is another example of how Menander uses mistaken identity not as a simple plot device, but to develop his characters. Though the play is based on a typical plot involving twins, the dramatic interest is focused on the psychology of Glycera, the female twin, and her husband, Polemon. Menander emphasizes Polemon’s growth from frenzied jealous lover to guilt-ridden, frightened man to beloved and forgiven husband, and Glycera’s role as agent of his reformation.

But the most interesting play of Menander’s we possess is the Epitrepontes or The Arbitration, acknowledged in antiquity and by modern commentators as one of Menander’s finest. It opens as the protagonist Charisios returns from a long journey and discovers that while he was away, his wife Pamphile, having been raped before their marriage at a religious festival, has had a child. He rejects her, moves out, takes a mistress, and determines to lead a dissolute life in retaliation for her defilement. The child is discovered with identifying birth tokens, in this case the ring which Pamphile pulled from her assailant’s hand. The ring turns out to be Charisios’; he was his wife’s unknown assailant and is, of course, the father of the child. As the plot summary suggests, Menander’s play does not conform with the often repeated paradigms of New Comedy; though the situation is domestic, it does not involve a young man who thwarts parental authority in attempting to win a girl. The complications of plot are only a pretext for the real business of the play: Charisios’ recognition of his own guilt, his confrontation of the fact that he committed rape but rejected his wife merely for being the victim of such a crime.

More important than any mistaken identity is his discovery of Pamphile’s continued loyalty. When her father Smikrines, angry at his son-in-law’s unreasonable and extravagant behavior, attempts to persuade his daughter to reject her husband, Charisios overhears her refusal to leave him. For Menander, the important discovery for his protagonist is that his wife, whom he has rejected for being the victim of a crime he himself has committed, refuses to obey her father and remains loyal to her husband. His discovery of her devotion prompts this confrontation with himself which was evidently Menander’s intention, a conclusion we make because he dramatizes Charisios’ reaction to his wife’s loyalty, not his discovery of his own paternity, nor his discovery that his wife is the mother of his child. Mistaken identity is not simply a plot device, but the means for Charisios’ self-confrontation.

The scene begins with a monologue spoken by the servant in which he describes Charisios’ response to the conversation between Pamphile and her father. Charisios, we are told, lost his mind, his color changed, his eyes were bloodshot, and he hit himself over the head. Onesimos even reports Charisios’ condemning himself, recognizing his ironic identity with his wife’s situation:

‘I’m the miscreant! I’m the one that did such a thing! I myself am the father of a bastard child! Yet I never had nor gave her a fraction of forgiveness in her misfortune over these same matters! A pitiless barbarian!’ (p. 123)¹⁰

By having Onesimos’ description of his master’s reaction to the discovery precede Charisios’ own speech, Menander shifts the dramatic emphasis from the moment of discovery itself to its effect on Charisios’ character. His soliloquy demonstrates his acknowledgement of guilt and increased self-understanding:

A man without feelings, always looking to his reputation, always discriminating between the fine act and the disgraceful, a man untouched by vice, himself blameless in his mode of life – oh, well and altogether fittingly the divine power has dealt with me! Here and now it has revealed me. ’O thrice a wretch, though only a man, you puff yourself up and talk big. Yet you cannot endure your wife’s unwilled misfortune. But I will show you fallen into similar straits. She will treat you kindly then, though you dishonor her now. And you will be shown all at once as an unfortunate and clumsy fool! Indeed she said to her father then quite what you were thinking – oh yes! That she had become the partner of your life, that it wasn’t right for her to shun an adventitious misfortune. But you were such a high-minded fellow!’ [Six lines lost] But what is her father to me? I’ll say directly to him, ‘Don’t give me trouble, Smikrines. My wife is not going to leave me. Why harass and pressure Pamphile?’. (p. 124)¹¹

Classicists generally agree that the conventions of selfabsorption on stage have more in common with Euripidean tragedy than with Aristophanic comedy.¹² In an invented divine rebuke, Charisios imagines a supernatural power addressing him, condemning his hypocrisy. Robert Weimann claims that this soliloquy ‘seems so out of context and dramatically inappropriate that it is easily turned to comic effect … the illusion of not being overheard still must have seemed so weak that it could be comically dismissed’.¹³ In the standard commentary on this text, however, the noted classicist E. H. Sandbach points out that τò δαιμόνιον is a vague term meaning ‘supernatural power’ not found elsewhere in Menander or the remains of New Comedy.¹⁴ The phrase is not banal, but elevates the speech above the level of the comic everyday, as does the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia. Here and elsewhere, Menander uses tragic diction, as E. W. Handley has observed, not for its purely laughable or satiric possibilities as does Aristophanes, but to gain an extra dimension for his comic action by referring it implicitly to the classical standard of tragedy.¹⁵ Not only modern critics, but late classical, medieval and Renaissance commentators as well, recognized this tragic dimension in Menander’s comedy. Donatus, for example, several times notes that Terence diverges from Menander lest his play should rise up into tragedy.

The rhetorical figure prosopopoeia not only contributes to the seriousness of the speech, but more importantly allows for the kind of self-address we find Shakespeare using later over and over again throughout the comedies and tragedies whenever a character questions his identity.¹⁶ Aphthonius’ popular rhetoric, we should remember, recommended the figure for creating character and praises Menander as its best practitioner. Prosopon is a compound form of the preposition pros (in front of), and opon (face), and therefore means not simply ‘person’ or ‘face’ but ‘mask’, προσωπιον. In the most literal sense the word means ‘to make or create a mask’: prosopopoeia is a figure of impersonation, and it is translated as such by the Renaissance figurists. The verbal form in Greek means both ‘to personify’ and ‘to dramatize a dialogue’. In sixteenth-century rhetorical handbooks, the figure was often associated with dialogisimus. The wearer of a mask is projected beyond his personal identity to become ‘other’ as happens to Charisios in this scene – he loses his identity and is transformed by assuming a rhetorical mask which enables him to address himself. His speech, both as reported and as dramatized, manifests those features which reappear characteristically in comedies of mistaken identity at moments of dramatic tension, usually preceding or during the scene of comic discovery. First we find self-address through the objectification of self in second-person self-reference, here through the rhetorical figure, prosopopoeia, for the supernatural power with whom Charisios converses plays the role of his conscience. Next, Menander uses rhetorical questions (lines 918–20, 928–31) to extend the I/you dichotomy and he relates the speaker firmly to the material situation (cf. lines 908 ff.). Missing from Charisios’ soliloquy are the enriching nuances created by metaphor so important to Angelo’s speech and to our sense of his inner life. Prosopopoeia, though an effective means of creating inner dialogue, is less subtle than Shakespeare’s more internalized dialogue with self in Measure for Measure II, ii, 162–87. Nevertheless, Charisios, like Angelo, must lose himself to find his true identity.

In his study of the popular tradition, Weimann complains that Menander and the New Comic dramatists, instead of considering themselves as ‘guardians of and sharers in public interests’, were paid entertainers, often strangers, like Diphilos and Philemon, to cities where their plays were performed.¹⁷ This changed relation to theatrical practice along with political changes in Greek social life such as the discontinuation of the theorikon – the subsidy which enabled all citizens to attend the public theatres – brought about a widening gulf between the actor and his audience. Weimann views the gulf and New Comedy in general as a decline from the popular tradition of Aristophanes.

But as he himself points out, this separation of actor and audience also brought about an ‘increasing dramatic illusion of verisimilitude’ which led to the development of fictive settings and the so-called fourth wall. As the theatrical scene achieved a higher level of representation, the actors submitted to new conventions of illusion and impersonation, particularly the increased use of soliloquy spoken not to the audience, but to the self, a dialogue which the audience overhears from the other side of the fourth wall.¹⁸

Nevertheless, anti-realistic features characteristic of Old Comedy such as masks continued to be employed by New Comic dramatists. The custom of wearing masks provides an interesting perspective on mistaken identity in Menander’s plays. T. B. L. Webster points out that

in the recognition plays the audience would know as soon as they saw the girl that she was going to be recognized as a citizen whatever might be her momentary status, and the mask would confirm the hint given in the prologue speech.¹⁹

The masks, like the prologues which explain the errors, emphasize the irony on which so many of these plays are built by constantly reminding the audience, even in moments of extreme crisis, of the true identity of the characters. What kind of mask is given to a character who comes to some radical realization about himself in the course of the play – Knemon in the Dyskolus or Charisios in the Epitrepontes? L. A. Post suggests that Charisios may have been presented in a new mask as a reformed character in the final scenes, but he may have retained his earlier mask, an ironic reminder to the audience of his double self.²⁰

As Sidonius long ago recognized, the Epitrepontes and Terence’s Hecyra or The Mother-in-law share the same central plot device, a rape which results in the birth of a child, the repudiation of a wife, and a central irony, that the husband was his wife’s unknown assailant. Terence, however, handles the plot quite differently, in ways which serve to illuminate Menander’s intentions to dramatize Charisios’ development and psychological change. Like Pamphile in Menander’s play, Terence’s Philumena is a loving, dutiful and patient wife. The young husband, Pamphilus, has a history of dissipation, but obeys his father in marrying. Here the similarities end. When Terence’s play opens, Philumena has returned to her parents’ house. The cause of her return, her pregnancy, is a secret not only from the other characters, but from us in the audience as well. The young husband’s mother is blamed for Philumena’s departure, because, as Terence’s title indicates, he bases his play on one of the oldest clichés in the world, the familial problems which marriage creates: the conflicting loyalties of son to mother, son to wife, mother to daughter, and father to son. The courtesan Bacchis, whom Pamphilus once loved, discovers he was his wife’s assailant and has Pamphilus’ servant tell him of the discovery in the final scene. Pamphilus is overjoyed and simply returns to his wife with no avowals of guilt or self-accusation. With his usual selfishness, he even manages to keep the news of his crime from his father. Character development and self-knowledge are not a part of Terence’s dramatic strategy in the Hecyra.

In most of Shakespeare’s comedies, however, as in Menander’s, the self-deceived undergo changes which are integral to the movement of the plot. In both the comedies and the tragedies, the ignorant or self-deceived are the protagonists, the characters whose fates concern us. Both playwrights use the comic soliloquy with its characteristic features of dialogue to dramatize character development. By contrast, in Jonsonian and much Roman comedy, ignorance and self-deception function to render the victim susceptible to intrigue perpetrated by other characters, and also to expose his folly, but are not designed to effect a change in character.

Plautus and Terence did, however, imitate Menander and the New Comic dramatists. We need to turn now to Latin comedy and its use of soliloquy and mistaken identity to examine the ways in which these traditions for representing character development were carried on and passed eventually into the Renaissance.